


The Harlot's Codex

by alluthebird (legarevirtuoso)



Series: By Cruel Magic Taken [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Eventual Relationships, F/M, Gen, Mistaken for Royalty, Modern Girl in Thedas, Necessary evil is still evil, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 17:16:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5975164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/legarevirtuoso/pseuds/alluthebird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's lost her friend, her world, and her life in the space of a night. And so she weaves her story of lies upon lies, a tangled weave to protect and maim alike. This is the story of the woman who burns one world to save another. Survival is the hardest thing when the truth is too fantastic to be believed.</p>
<p>Otherwise known as: "How the Tevinter screwed up; Vasilisa loses her mind and has a fantastic time doing it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Harlot's Codex

**Should for all seasons laments ring the sky-vaults,** ****  
**Should dirges all sages and histories replace?** ****  
**By gods forsaken, fate emptied of hope,** ****  
**Wounded I fell then, by grief arrow-studded,** **  
** **Never to heal, death for me come.**

**\-- Canticle of Andraste 1:6**

 

This shouldn’t be happening. It couldn’t possibly be happening. Not to her, not to anyone she held near and dear to her heart.

 

Blood. A sea of it, churned into mud that clinged and reeked of offal and shame combined. It was enough to make her vomit violently. The universe had to give her credit that she did at least attempt to purge her system on a patch of ground that wasn’t currently occupied by a corpse. She would have, honestly, if there had been anywhere in her vicinity to do so. The woman was seemingly alone in the gloom and murk, hands scrabbling over armor and bloodied flesh alike.

 

One hand slipped, the last body functions of the corpse she balanced on slicking through her fingers as she heaved and heaved again. There was nothing like peace in the eyes of the dead man she had her arm buried in. She could feel the rapidly cooling textures and sticky fluids that marked him as something more than a medical cadaver, the itch and burn of his beard as it rasped against her chin.

 

Cold and dead. No life to be found, no glory in his demise. The woman could keep her lips pressed against his for an eternity, hand clenching and unclenching on his heart, but there was no breath of life she could summon to make this go away.

 

The metal of his breastplate is cold against her chest, the shattered remains digging into her skin. She can see the walls of ruins to her left, the greyish white stone long since stained with signs of the battle. The man is dead, she knows that as her fingers stroke at his diaphragm. There is no heartbeat, no way this man could have survived this terrible set of injuries.

 

She keeps her eyes on his cold and lifeless ones, methodically puts space between her person and his. Careful, so slow and careful, if only to avoid the brush of the erection his demise granted him. She might have liked him when he was alive.

 

But he is dead.

 

This man, in his armor and oh so carefully she skips her eyes over it all, is dead.

 

The man next to him is dead.

 

The woman to her left is dead.

 

The man to her right, the one who looks like he couldn’t have been older than fifteen when he died and now has the honor of being her footrest, is dead.

 

The story repeated, over and over.

 

And so over and over she tries to hurl, presses her hand to her mouth and stomach to keep her insides reasonably where they should be. She tastes blood, smells it, can’t help but let it seep into her every pore. Her skin is white as milk, shock leeching all the color out with what mucus and air she manages to dry heave onto the ground.

 

Something is moving. Something is alive here.

 

She drops, legs and arms working with desperation to burrow under the man she had spent such a pleasurable instance with. And she breathes through his hair, closes her eyes and tries desperately not to think of how the thing sounds.

 

It lurches next to the corpse she hides under, stepping on the fallen with a careless heave of its foul smelling frame. The woman can smell it, pressed into the churned mud by the heavy body of the much larger man as she is. She would pray, but she doesn’t know who to direct it to.

 

Her eyes keep shifting over the symbol engraved so proudly on the armor, her skin prickling as she carefully tries not to memorize the impression.

 

The thing stops next to her, and she bites her lip to keep from screaming in shock. She tries not to breathe it in, that charnel house stench coupled with the smell of rancid fat and half-decayed compost, and finds herself gagging on saliva she didn’t know she was capable of producing. The skin on its face has gone white, fat deposits on its cheeks sallow and waxen.

 

She can see its teeth. They’re jagged things, rotten in spots and flecked with the same black liquid that covers the rest of its face. The woman can’t help it, her own teeth ripping through her lip as she stifles her scream of horror. All she can see of the world is a giant blur, glasses long gone in the world she’s left behind. But terror makes the world all that much sharper when she squints hard enough, and it is enough to focus on the thing above her.

 

She must scream, but she will die if she does.

 

There are shreds of red stuck in its teeth. She doesn’t question it. Not when the thing falls so angrily upon the corpse of the boy she can see through the gap in her shelter’s hair. Ripping and tearing and gulping at the flesh of the corpse. She can hear its delight and can feel the tears pricking at her eyes as she breathes so quietly. In for one count, out for three. Breathe and stay quiet. It feasts on the the dead and her lip won’t survive the night. Instead she latches her teeth into the leather strap that holds this man’s armor together. And she can’t take her eyes away.

 

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises…

 

She remembers that from somewhere. The where doesn’t matter so much as the sudden clarity she feels. The creature feasts, and she can feel the warm sting of urine running down her legs. It turns its head and she freezes, still as a deer caught in a bright light and mentally sobbing.

 

It has finished with the intestines of the boy, and the thing lurches its way over to the body she hides under. The thing closes its fingers - broken nails gone yellow and brown and black and twisting over fingers like branches on a dead tree - over this man’s insides and pulls and pulls and pulls. The woman cannot blink, will not blink, not even as the milky eyes of the creature pass over her pressed into the mud.

 

Later, if she survives, she can cry about it. For now she counts herself lucky that the corpse is so much larger than her, that the thing had already gorged itself on the flesh and bones of the body before.

 

Its fingers slip through the hole in the corpse’s torso, barely missing its spine before scratching away. And she can feel its nails pressed against her cold and muddy skin and she mustn’t make a sound lest it find her-

 

A tiny gasp. The monster turns its head. -

  
  


The sky was dark and the night rather seasonably warm for that time of year. She forgot what day it was, as per usual, but did at least remember that she had places to be

 

She’s drunk, or at least she was when she started her walk. The party she had been at had gotten rowdy, her friends growing overly loud and obsessed with sex the more they drank. And so she had taken a break, lest she succumb to the urge to vomit from the pounding in her head. There’s nothing out there but scrub-like trees and grass that came to the tops of her ankles, the house behind her and the porch light flickering with insects.

 

It took a few minutes for her to find a spot in the field where she could see the road and get a single bar of reception on her phone. It took far less time for her to pull open her text messages and scroll through her last conversation.

 

Her friend was gone. That night had been in part a costume party (because if one could say anything about the woman and her friends it was that they were hilariously in love with the romantic notion of costume parties and sex after) and in part the woman’s quiet way of dealing with the grief that threatened to drive her mad. Her friend was gone. No texts, no messages left on her blog. She had spent hours scouring the dregs of the Internet to find even the tiniest of shreds of information. Normally such research would have filled her with joy, a purpose for her trawling in place of her usually mindless scrolling.

 

A coma. Her friend was in a coma and no source could tell her why or what was going on. She hadn’t managed to coerce her managers into giving her time off for her desperate flight north, and instead had quietly settled for giving her two weeks notice. Her last paycheck would have to suffice for rent and bills as she panicked her way across the border. The woman’s flight left in the morning, and she tapped out a text message to one of her mutual friends to inform her of her flight schedule and hotel reservation. She would figure out what in the hell was going on if it was the last thing she did.

 

The woman’s name was, quite frankly, irrelevant. Her occupation the same and her age laughable. It was enough to know that she was, in fact, a woman possessed of enough common sense and moral fiber to know that something was fucking wrong and like fuck was she going to just let the mystery go gentle into the quiet night. She wasn’t a philosopher. If anything, the woman was the sort of person who would rather bury her enemies in enough blackmail for them to hang themselves and go on her merry way without a single shred of concern for the after effects.

 

She lit a cigarette with a frown, waiting for the chime of an answering message so she could move the hell on with her plans for the evening. Frankly she had gotten tired of all the madness at the party, and she clamped her lips down over her cigarette so she could roll up the ridiculous sleeves of her costume. Really, what had possessed her to show up in the mildly warm Texas night while wearing a thick cotton medieval chemise and a corset that made her ribs ache? What in the name of all that was holy had made her think that another thick cotton skirt and heeled leather boots was necessary? She was boiling alive, not to mention the unpleasant itch that meant a few mosquitoes had found the visible skin over her breasts and decided to have a late night snack.

 

The situation was beyond mildly unpleasant and could not possibly get any worse.

 

Oh how very wrong she was.

 

This shouldn’t be happening. It couldn’t possibly be happening. Not to her, not to anyone she held near and dear to her heart.

 

Her world ended in agony.

 

The cigarette in her mouth dropped to the ground and fizzled out in the mud as she clutched at her head and panted. She had stopped screaming sometime between the first hour and the last second of her skin peeling from her body and her blood boiling in her veins. Her head pounded and ached, and no amount of pressing her fingers against her temples was going to make it stop. She tasted blood in the back of her throat, the coppery taste tainted like Ranch dressing dripping down her nose as she tilted her head back.

 

She had fallen to her knees at some point outside of her memory, folded over backwards so her back was pressed into the cold and reeking mud. Her head bumped against something, making the pounding in her head double back with a vengeance. And as she hurled what little contents she had in her stomach all over the ground, hands shaking as she tried to hold the dyed strands of her hair out of the way. All of her body screamed in agony, muscles she didn’t even know existed crying out for her to lay down and rest.

 

There’s blood in her hair.

 

She tried to wipe it off with her fingers and ended up making it worse, added mud and more blood to the mix until she gave up with a hoarse sigh.

 

It’s quiet. After the glorious choir of voices and the natural soundtrack of life in Texas, the silence was maddening. She wanted to sing, to scream and hear her voice echo to drown out the sound of nothing alive.

 

There’s so much blood. A sea of it, churned into mud that clung and reeked of offal and shame combined. She can see nothing but corpses as far as she looks, some of them draped across the shattered remains of some culture long gone like someone had tossed their clothes after a hard day’s work. There’s a man at her feet, under the tips of her toes and his face looks so familiar even to her aching head that can’t string together a coherent thought.

 

This isn’t happening.

 

_ The monster turns its head. _

 

It scrapes its fingers against the boning of her corset, nails tearing through the thick cotton she had bemoaned a moment and an eternity ago. She can feel her heart stop in her chest as she stares into its eyes, strangely bloated and filmy with some undescribable ailment.

 

The monster lifts the flesh to its teeth and chews, tosses its head back slightly as the blood runs down its chin.

 

She mustn’t make a sound. Don’t blink. Don’t cry. Don’t focus on the feeling of wings on an animal that shouldn’t exist.

 

There are no Grey Wardens.

 

Darkspawn do not exist.

 

The monster looks down. She can feel sweat and blood beginning to mix in the crevices of her corset, soaking through what parts of her chemise remained clean from her flailing around. The urine on her legs, soaked into her nylon stockings, has started to chafe and burn uncomfortably. She can't move. Can't make a sound.

 

The human body contains approximately ten meters of intestinal track, and the monster-that-is-not-a-darkspawn seems determined to go through all of them. Her fingers shake and shake as she tries so hard not to move. The thing above her, the thing she so desperately wants to pretend isn't actually happening, stops its feasting just as her desperate fingers close over something hard and vaguely fist sized.

 

It shoves the corpse off her and she bites back a scream as she pulls herself to a crouch. There isn't time to contemplate the morality of her actions as she slams the rock into the thing's head with a sickeningly wet crunch. Over and over she silently sobs as she brings the thing to its knees, over and over she drives the rock into its now mangled face. It was easy, far too easy, to take the thing down. There hadn’t been a shred of grace in her frantic lunge, nothing but a tackle straight out of Jack Tatum’s playbook that would have made her father proud. By the time she comes back to herself the thing’s head is a mess of pulpy matter and shards of bone and the woman shakes and clutches the bloody rock in numb fingers.

 

She lets the rock slip out of her grip and holds her shaking hands in front of her face. Her face distorts in a series of gasping cries, and she wants to put her hands to her mouth and sob. But she can’t, not with the stinging pain in her face and the strange blackness that covers her hands. It isn’t safe, not if this is real (and she doesn’t want to contemplate how surreal this is that she’s even considering this as real and not some overly elaborate and truly depraved prank), and she refuses to become a monster like that.

 

There are only four reasons a Darkspawn has to approach a living being: kill them, eat them, taint them (which is really a by-product of the first two goals), or convert them into Broodmothers. None of those options is something the woman wants to contemplate.

 

Her safety will come from treating this as reality until proven otherwise.

 

The human mind is capable of rationalizing some of the most socially repugnant things in the name of survival. One of the most effective techniques to attain the level of sane efficiency the woman needs to live through this is compartmentalization (or as she likes to call it: fuck this shit, I will deal with it later). She doesn’t have the time or energy to waste on the panic attack she really wants to have, so she forces herself to breathe through her nose and out through her mouth in a terrible parody of calm. For the sake of argument, the woman takes this as seriously as she can.

 

This is not a game. The monster she just beat to death with a rock is in fact a Darkspawn from a video game series she skipped most of the first game of. Dragon Age, while a not so guilty pleasure in her life, was not a game series she really paid much attention to until the second (because really, Awakening was basically just an added chapter to Origins) game. She played the elves, always the elves, only made it to Lothering before giving up. Really, she rather liked the political clusterfuck of the second game and the micro-managing of the third game much more than the first. But the woman’s parents did not raise a complete idiot, and the internet had ramped up her established sense of paranoia with more facts than she ever really knew what to do with.

 

Her phone is gone. Not that it mattered, save for the eight hours of battery life that would have allowed her to be a god of calculator application abuse and selfie spamming. Her cigarettes are ruined, but her Zippo lighter remains mostly functional. In desperate need of a cleaning and only half full, but a source of fire is a source of fire. She has exactly zero weapons, because her bare hands do not count as weapons against Darkspawn. This is swiftly alleviated by shoving over the corpse of the darkspawn and relieving it of the maul it had strapped to its back. She rests her new best friend against her shoulder and pretends her hands aren’t covered in blood and mud as she swiftly bundles the once dyed blonde mass of her ill-fated attempt at a mohawk into a bun at the crown of her head.

 

She bends to the side and scrambles against the armor plating of the dead soldier long enough to relieve him of his belt, knife and all. Her much bemoaned and now completely ruined skirt is unceremoniously sliced into quarters, because who ever survived this sort of situation while attempting to preserve their womanly modesty. There’s no one around to see her underwear and she’d rather survive as a frightful mess than die looking pretty. Sadly, the corpses she can see in her immediate vicinity are a bust for forced upgrading of what she’s privately calling her ‘starting shit tier gear’.

 

She’s too small for it all. Normally she’s perfectly fine with being the butt of every height joke (really, not her fault she’s a few inches short of the American average for ladies). But now her life is depending on her ability to arm and armor up as quickly and efficiently as possible, and her height is ruining her defensive capabilities. Fun fact of life: armor is not magically one size fits all.

 

The best way to survive a clusterfuck, at least according to the school of ‘what to do when you are completely fucked’ by her soldier father, is to assume the worst thing possible at all times. If it turns out that you were over prepared, you may thus be pleasantly surprised instead of being painfully violated with no lubrication by the world in general.

 

She assumes that Darkspawn have magically gained the ability to simultaneously network their thoughts in a hivemind that would make quantum entanglement computing at faster than light speeds look like a snail going through salt. Killing one darkspawn, however easy it may have been, has thus been ranked in her nightmares right up with ‘startling the witch’ and ‘pressing the big red unknown button’.

 

She runs.

 

Or at least as carefully as one can run when the ground is covered with the dead and you were the idiot who wore heels to a party. While yes her boots have rather chunky heels that only give her a paltry few inches and she’s worn them for years, she is still wearing heels in the slippery muck that used to be perfectly good solid ground. So she takes the safer of her options and starts using the dead like stepping stones whenever possible. It’s a bit like running suicide drills, only she finds herself curiously able to breathe after a few minutes. Well, as much as one can breathe while laced into a corset.

 

This is impressive to her, and she would chalk it up to panic except she knows that an overweight smoker does not sprint well past the hundred yard mark and here she is doing it anyway with a maul slung over her shoulder like a baseball bat. Her legs should be burning and she should be getting tired, but she feels light as a feather and like she could do this forever. She chalks it up to adrenaline, wonderful adrenaline that makes fight-or-flight responses effective and mothers lift cars off of trapped children, and keeps on going. Many aborted hours of physical exertion with her father over the years have taught her that she is going to deeply regret doing all of this in the morning.

 

But what choice does she have?

 

There are certain things the woman knows she needs to survive. Three minutes of air, three days before she needs water, three weeks before she needs food. She is not and never will be a wilderness survival expert, so two of those three things are not ones she is confident in her ability to safely find. The woman is a creature of cities and modern technology, and she is not equipped to deal with the prospect of traipsing about the back end of Thedas without some assistance from people who know better. In order to accomplish that, she’s going to have to find someone alive and get directions.

 

Ostagar is not a place conducive to finding the living. She realizes that as she has to slide on her knees to avoid being decapitated by a particularly opportunistic darkspawn. The thing and its two friends aren’t the brightest tools in the proverbial shed, but they still outnumber and outclass her enough to make her wary. She slides out of range and gets to her feet, squares off and bounces on her toes. Sure, her father may have gotten her started on her love of close quarters combat (CQC day as a child was always the best), but she’s never actually fought for anything more than points and pride.

 

Assume the worst, pray for the best.

 

She can’t be sloppy or slow, but most of all she can’t be hit. Her palms are sweaty, and she has to force herself to breathe on a count to calm her heart. All of her hours of mixed martial arts do not make for mastery of maul combat. So she treats it like a particularly bulky staff, darts forward and slams the head of it between the first monster’s legs and grins when she feels something shatter beneath her palms. The trick, at least in her head, was to keep the maul moving and her personal space unviolated. So she resorted to the flashiest tricks she ever learned, content that the weight of her maul and centrifugal force would do most of the work of keeping distance for her. This may not be a video game, but she can still link combos perfectly fine. Darkspawn like these are not intelligent. A feint is something they treat as a legitimate attack and react accordingly. So she flurries and does the unexpected:

 

The woman breaks bones with style.

 

That isn’t to say that her fight is clean, for when she’s done she feels dirtier than she’s ever felt in her life. She goes after throats and skulls, groins and feet, kneecaps and elbows. Her only offense is to rip them apart bit by bit and then frantically smash their skulls into paste by any means necessary. And even when they have fallen she only has enough time to pant before she goes dashing off again.

 

Her goal is the army camp these corpses came from. But she can’t just run in a straight line, because that’s how people get ganked. She makes her way through the battlefield one cluster of corpses at a time, cutting left when anyone with sense would expect her to go right. Sometimes she drops to the ground and breathes like bellows, pops up and smashes a straggler to bits before dashing off again. All of her hurts now, and there isn’t a part of her that isn’t coated in blood or mud.

 

She loses track of time in the gloom, not even that half whispered method of ‘fingers to the sun means time’ working in the Blight. There’s no reason to bother wondering how long she’s been at it, just a bone deep knowledge that stopping means dying. Fighting in a full corset is a curious mix between wearing armor and not being able to bend her back, but after the second gouge in the orthopedic material she’s come to the conclusion that sacrifices had to be made to keep her insides not falling out to the outside.

 

The camp has been decimated by Darkspawn and deserters alike. She creeps through like a ghost, as silent as she can manage and focused on her goals. Water, food, armor, weapons.

 

She washes off as much of the muck as she can in the first water barrel she finds using strips cut from a tent as washcloths. The second barrel she ignores in favor of looting the sack against it, stuffing in as many bits of edible looking matter as she can find before tying it to her back with more strips of the tent. She finds a water skin (or really what had been someone’s wine stash) and empties it on the ground, filling it from the barrel twice and drinking it in forced sips before she fills it a third time and adds it into her impromptu backpack. She takes the opportunity to utilize the little ladies’ bucket, because at this point she’s come to grips with the fact that she’s not going to see a proper flushing toilet for quite some time.

 

Frankly she’s lost count of how many darkspawn she’s smashed to pieces, but her maul breaks on the last straggler that lurches into the tent. Desperate and trying not to howl from frustration, she tackles it to the ground and smacks its head against the ruined cobblestones until all she sees is pulp, then does her absolute best to get the hell out of Dodge before something bigger that she can’t handle realizes she’s there.

 

Some distant part of her brain praises whatever god is listening when she stumbles across what appears to be what remains of a quartermaster’s stock. The poor bastard had at least had the decency to section of his stock by what she has to assume are races and then sizes, and she tries not to think of the ramifications of the fact that she has to loot her gear from what appears to be the dwarf section. Her trusty old boots are tossed to the side and swiftly replaced by the only boots that look reasonably close to her size, and she straps on the splint mail gloves that match.

 

The maul is a lucky find, its shaft sticking up out of the mess of a locked chest that she slings over her shoulder experimentally before nodding and setting off again.

 

Ostagar may have been a ruined clusterfuck, but she doesn’t want to live there. The woman has spent enough time there that she never wants to see it again and can’t leave it fast enough. She follows the shittiest path she’s ever seen, weighs the weight of her wilderness survival skills against the likelihood of encountering life and decides that relative convenience outweighs her ability to navigate unknown territory in the dark. Her ability to complete a twelve mile road march? Not necessarily something she could accomplish in three hours like her father wanted her to be able to do, but she’d bring dishonor on her family’s proverbial cow if she couldn’t use her own feet to get her the hell away from Ostagar.

 

She ran on that road until her lungs started giving up and her legs burned, and then she made herself walk until her breathing settled. The waterskin made its appearance only during her walks. She could set a watch by her run, adjusted for conditions. Two miles in eighteen minutes, then ten minutes of quick marching, then right back to running. When her legs want to give up she reminds herself of the way the darkspawn had slurped up that man’s intestines like overcooked pasta and keeps right on walking.

 

But not even adrenaline can keep that pace up forever. When her vision starts to go hazy, she staggers off the road and lurches to the biggest cluster of vegetation she can find. Namely, she scouts out a clump of bushes big and thick enough to cover her and her new maul buddy for the most fitful sleep she has ever had.

 

She wakes when the sun rises on the horizon, feeling like overworked dough that has coincidentally developed a tremor. Everything itches, and it’s the branch digging into her nose that reminds her that this is not in fact all just one terrible dream.

 

The bite on her lip has scabbed over enough for her to risk eating some of the rather questionable food she looted the day before. When she tries to chew on a hunk of jerky, she remembers the way the darkspawn had scrabbled its fingers against her breast and found her heart beating-

 

She throws the meat away with a wrenching gag. Not a sound, or the darkspawn will find her.

 

Running has become second nature, but instead she forces herself to keep pace to a sustainable quick time march. Really she could maintain this pace in her sleep (she has before, during that fantastic time where her college ROTC squad had drill at o’dark thirty in the middle of Hell Week) and at least she doesn’t have to worry about maintaining proper dress and distance so much as the horde of monsters at her back.

 

It’s a gods blessed miracle that she hasn’t encountered any living darkspawn on her hike from her nightmares. She may be armed with a shiny new (or at least third-hand) maul, but she rather stupidly picked the most impractical weapon out of the pile. Familiarity with the fine art of rifle tricks and drill is one thing, but using the equivalent of a pipe with a couple of weights at one end with military rifle drill isn’t the same thing. It’s been a few years since she last practiced, and she already knows that if she survives she’s going to be spending hours of her day running drills with whatever weapon of choice she manages to keep.

 

The sound of metal clashing against metal makes her pick up her pace until she comes to a fair distance away from the combat. She may not know this man from Adam, but she refuses to let any person fall victim to darkspawn if she can help it. The monsters are distracted, a cluster of eight things facing off against just one soldier.

 

She breaks into a sprint, jumping at the last second to bring her new metal kneeguards slamming into the back of a darkspawn’s head. The heavy end of her maul is slammed into the thing’s back and she pulls a swirling spin that would make a stripper proud, sliding to the side and bringing her weapon back up in the weirdest move from the ground to a golf swing straight to the things head.

 

Not that there’s golf in Thedas.

 

She doesn’t have enough room to swing her maul at the next darkspawn, and settles instead for giving it a nice and solid left hook as she rests the weapon against her shoulder. It doesn’t go down, so she hops back and to the side and kicks it in the head. Who cares if the strangers get a flash of her underwear? The darkspawn eats dirt and that was rather the point of the operation. Its friend (and oh how loosely she uses that term) gets a lucky shot to her waist with its sinfully disgusting knife, so she headbutts it in the chin and slams her maul from her shoulder to its waist in a one handed swing.

 

She breaks its head open with a judicious overhead smack of the bulky end of her maul and turns to grin at the next closest darkspawn. And then she whirls on her toes and smacks at her third darkspawn in a frenzy until someone clears their throat behind her.

 

The woman blinks up at the man and shyly waves her hand as she drags her maul out of the ruined corpse. She’s killed three darkspawn to his five, and she’d be impressed with her average if she wasn’t so tired.

 

One man alone in the middle of the road from Ostagar. The male, obviously a heavy hitter like she has become overnight judging from the long sword he handled with familiarity she's never seen. Black haired, solitary, beige and yellow leather vest-thing that looked like a uniform. He wore his hair close cropped but shaggy like he hadn't bothered to trim it in awhile.

 

Because clearly the universe was out to get her.

 

A real live person. Which meant the piles of monsters around her were in fact real dead darkspawn.

 

The maul fell from suddenly limp fingers. “Oh. No.” Her voice was hoarse and ragged, all the joy and life sucked out in two swift syllables, muttered syllables slipped out through gritted teeth. No. This was not happening. This could not possibly be happening. This was real. It had all been real. Every. Last. Mind-numbing. Second. Had. Been. Real.

 

There’s a distant sound like the roaring of some savage beast in her ears that thumps along with her rabbit-racing heart. She staggers, tries to breathe and chokes on her sudden panic. The world tilts and goes black, and all she knows is a sudden press of warmth against her front and the distant sound of gibbering madness.

 

_ Waiter? Check please. _

  
  
  


The man caught the girl with one arm, surprise flickering on his face at the unexpected lightness of the child. She had to be a child, so very tiny and alone out on the road from Ostagar. What kind of parent would bring their daughter to an army camp about to engage in battle with darkspawn? He didn’t remember seeing any families at Ostagar, but then again the role of a Ferelden Man-at-Arms wasn’t to wander around the camp in search of children and women. The man would have remembered a little girl like this, blood-splattered and grimy as she was.

 

She was small, barely coming up to his chest as she slumped over in his embrace. He dropped to a knee to cradle her against him, stuck his sword in its sheathe to grasp her firmly. No sign of the Taint, no telltale spiderwebs of black in her veins or white in her brown eyes. A more thorough inspection revealed a gash in her lower lip that looked as if she had bitten straight through it rather recently. Her face was the sort that would be pretty if she had enough time to grow up, but was a gory mess of mud and questionable bodily fluids.

 

But the rest of her was mostly unharmed, save for scratches and cuts that had scabbed over enough for him to safely get her out of the range of the darkspawn. What kind of soldier would he be if he just left a little girl, however scantily or questionably clad, to fend for herself in the Wilds? So he slung her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and gripped her maul with his spare hand. As long as she didn’t wake up on the way and discover he was keeping her balanced against him with a hand on her backside, he would be fine.

 

Who let their daughter go about in her undergarments? What did ‘ia mi’ mean? Amy? Aimee? Was that her name? Was she some poor Orlesian chevalier’s daughter that had been caught in the crossfire? He’d never heard an accent that thick before. Aimee, for that was what he was determined to call her until he had a proper name, looked like she was in her early teens at the absolute latest. Her face was round with lingering baby fat, her little button nose something straight out of Rivain, and her eyes appeared to be round like an elf but not overwhelming in her face. If he didn’t know any better he would say she was from Rivain, but the paleness of her skin bespoke of some connection to Antiva. Aimee’s hair was where the man gave up trying to figure it out, with the short shaved sides of her head growing in a definitive black while the middle was as blonde as that darling Peaches girl that was so hung up on his brother.

 

If the armor Aimee was wearing was actually hers, he would eat his brother’s staff. The gauntlets looked like they belonged to a dwarf, and the boots and greaves looked like she had tried to make them fit by stuffing fabric in the gaps.

 

She slept like the dead, enough so that by the time he was tired enough to take a break he was able to set her down against a tree and she simply sighed and tried to wriggle her way back to his body heat like a puppy.

 

He cleaned her face and set a quick poultice against the worst of her wounds in an attempt to keep it from scarring. His mother would kill him if he just… left her like that. For Andraste’s sake, his brother would give him that ridiculous overly superior frown of his if he even so much heard about him contemplating leaving the girl there.

 

Aimee slept while he kept watch, right until she had barely passed the five hour mark. The sun was starting to set when she made a sad whimpering hiss like she couldn’t get enough breath, her fingers scrabbling at the ruined fabric of her corset. She gave the most unladylike moan when she finally found the cords on the front and picked the knot free, letting her corset loosen on her frame as she inhaled like air was a precious commodity worth more than gold.

 

He stopped polishing his sword to stare incredulously at the girl. She was a bit too well developed to be a child, so he rapidly ratcheted up his opinion of her age to at least early to mid teens. The girl was pretty, and lips that full should not be making sounds like that at such a young age. He licked his lips to say something, moved his arm just a little bit too quickly, or perhaps he breathed a little too hard in the paltry light the little campfire put off. For whatever reason, the girl rolled to take a knee, a knife he hadn’t seen somehow appearing in her shaking hands as she pointed it at him with fearful eyes. No. Not an elf then, but just possibly elf blooded enough to make her gulps of air look like practised panic.

 

The man put his sword on the ground, slow like he had to be to avoid spooking the family’s one and only cow. He put his hands out, empty and palms facing her so she could see he had nothing to hurt her. “I’m not going to hurt you. You’re safe.” She scrambled back for every movement he made, pointed her knife at him with white knuckles even as her eyes darted around the little camp. He tried to keep his voice as calm and soft as he did with that stupid cow, forced himself still to keep her from panicking. “Shush, shush. You’re all right.”

 

She stopped, tilted her head like a confused bird and stared at him. Her mouth opened and closed with a click of teeth, like she meant to speak but couldn’t find the courage to use her words. He hadn’t spoken very loudly before, a calm murmur of soothing sounds to keep her from bolting or attempting violence. His twin sister and older brother were always better at this sort of thing. The girl edged ever further away from him, one hand now clamped on her corset as her eyes darted between her maul and his seated form. “Hey, no. You’re all right. I’m Carver.” He tried to stay calm, slowly put his hands down to his sides as he turned his body to face her properly. “What’s your name?”

 

Her mouth opened to a dry exhale before she clapped her hand over her lips, eyes searching madly through the darkness. It was a long moment of silence before she locked her eyes on him, and whispered just one short word into the still darkness. “Vasilisa.” Her voice was hoarse from screaming, lip barely moving to accommodate the poultice he had slapped on.

 

“All right then. Vahsee- Do you have a nickname or something I can call you? Look… I’m not going to hurt you.” He gave the girl as much of a grin as he could manage in the gloom, tried his absolute best to look harmless. “You saved my hide back there, loathe as I am to admit it. Oh, here.” Carver reached to his side to hold up the girl’s maul - her name was Vahsee-something-something unpronounceable. It took him both hands to lift the thing she hefted over her head like it weighed no more than a rake, but he managed to set it down in the neutral area near the fire. “I tried to clean it off as best I could, but you’re going to have to buff the scratches out.” He tried to borrow his brother’s cheerful calm, and it failed in the face of a single branch snapping in the fire.

 

She bolted across the flames, dug her fingers into cord and pulled with a wince even as she snapped her head to find the source of the sound. “Hey, no. Nothing’s going to get you. You’re all right. Nothing but the fire.” Vasilisa glared over her shoulder with unbridled suspicion in her dark eyes, her brows furrowed as she tried to test the truth of his words. At least she was intelligent enough to know that there were things out there that would eat her alive. Not the best way to get children to trust you, but beggars couldn’t be choosers during a Blight. Carver smiled back at her, tried his best to seem nonchalant. “You put your armor on wrong.”

 

Damn it to the Void he was terrible at this.

 

Vasilisa hissed at him, teeth bared as her fingers curled into tight fists. She had put her armor on entirely wrong, the metal screeching as it all clanked up against parts it shouldn’t have been able to match. Her straps were too loose on her wrists and ankles, and the metal of her gauntlets and greaves slid down to scratch up against her hands and feet. The armor she had on was too large on her slender limbs, clearly designed for someone bigger and wider than she was.

 

Carver had seen dwarves, grew up with humans, watched carefully as the Dalish passed by. But he had never held the hand of a little girl with eyes so wide in her face as she scowled at him. “Ah… kid, you have to buckle it tighter in the middle, otherwise it just slides down. See?” He adjusted her gauntlets and tried not to laugh as her scowl slowly shifted into curiosity. She slid her knife into her belt and eagerly shoved her other hand under his nose as soon as he was even partially done, wiggled her fingers at him and tapped her feet in her impatience. Carver couldn’t help but laugh as her nose wrinkled at him. “All right, all right. I’ll help you fix it. Pay attention, all right?”

 

“Mhmm!” She went nearly cross-eyed as she tried to focus on what he did to the straps and buckles of her gauntlets. For his part, Carver tried not to think about how small her arm was in his hand, that delicate and light light limb that felt like soft cornsilk covering a steel sword. He had to crouch on his knees while she nearly flung herself to the ground to allow him access to her hastily buckled greaves.

 

Her calves were like that same silk sword woven with actual muscle before being wrapped in even more cornsilk. The calluses on his fingers snagged into the nearly see-through fabric that made up her strange socks, and he tried not to look up at the flash of vivid purple under the ruined jags of white fabric. Whoever this Vasilisa was, she had obviously not been involved in the actual combat of Ostagar. For a moment, he entertained the thought that she had been someone’s daughter, brought to camp to be a part of history in the making.

 

(There was a woman, whispered about in the rank and file, a princess hidden among the Grey Wardens. And her eyes were wide and her skin like buttermilk, an exotic beauty that he had only seen from afar before they had met by chance. This girl, this child, so similar and yet so strange at the same time.)

 

But this girl child in front of him, who eyed him warily and with a hint of fascination even as he fixed her armor, this girl was nothing like a warrior. She had no calluses from a life of hard work. Her body was plump under her corset, the boning of it forced her to have the figure of the woman she was not quite yet, and she looked like she hadn’t seen a shred of hardship before the Blight began. Vasilisa had to be some noble lady who had literally managed to flee Ostagar in nothing more than her undergarments. It was his duty to see her safe and sound back to someone with rank who could take care of her.

 

He had thought about it too long with her foot cradled in his hands. “... The things. What… what were those?” When she spoke it was with a rasp that could have been from her hardship, her chest still heaving to catch breaths that made her wince, the high pitch of a frightened child that brought him back out of his musing.

 

“Those are darkspawn.” The sudden fear on her face made him pause. “We’re going to outrun them. Straight back to Lothering. You should get some rest. We’re going to move at first light.” She nodded at him instead of answering, her eyes closed as she took a few breaths to calm herself. “I’m… going to have to lace you back in before we go.”

 

Vasilisa’s smile was as sad as her voice was broken. “I know.”

 

He kept his word.

 

Carver shook her awake when the first tendrils of light drifted over the horizon, ahead of the eternal cloud of darkness that meant the Blight was in full effect. In turn, she soundly punched him in the jaw on the way up. He rubbed his jaw and stared at her silently as she blushed. “Sorry. Bad dreams.”

 

Now that he could understand. He would just have to remember not to wake her up like that again. Maybe a bucket of water to the face next time. It was only fair, really. Wordlessly, she handed him her corset and pulled herself to her feet with a wince and a cough. Vasilisa’s breathing was unsteady as he placed it on her, her gauntleted fingers gripped at the surprisingly sturdy material as he laced her in. Her corset was thick enough to be the most uncompromising armor he had seen. “You’re going to have to take it careful with this on.”

 

“I know,” she winced as he tugged on the cord. Carver did his best not to stare at her rather well developed chest, and averted his eyes when he was done and she stepped back. She gripped the bottom of the material and jumped up and down until she was settled.

 

They rearmed themselves in silence, and she nodded to herself as he kicked dirt over the remains of the fire. “I can do this. I  _ can do this _ .” He didn’t say a word as she tried to steel herself for what was to come.

 

“We’re going to run. Can you manage it?” The girl’s inability to breathe properly with her corset on, and what he had a bad feeling was at least one broken rib, was going to be a hindrance. But with all the darkspawn about, there was no way he was going to be able to carry her all the way to Lothering. She was going to have to march on regardless of the pain she was in. Carver only had a few healing potions at his disposal, and it was best to use them only in the event of an emergency. Broken ribs, while painful, were not an emergency. The corset she was wearing would have to hold her together until Lothering.

 

She frowned, looked up at him with hard and determined eyes. “I have to. Or I die.” The girl took as deep a breath as she could manage, and slung her maul over her shoulder.

 

And so they ran. She kept up remarkably well, all things considering, and they kept up a grueling pace as the sun climbed in the sky. They had to make it to Lothering ahead of the horde, back to Carver’s family and someone who was hopefully looking for the girl that had become his charge. They walked when the pain became so bad that she cried, streaking through the dirt and blood on her face. They ran when she had collected herself again.

 

The strange girl knew how to conduct a military march, a thing that Carver himself hesitated over. She puked foam in the grass and kept on moving, never actually stopped unless it was at his signal. Vasilisa had put herself in his care, and she stayed silent as they marched. She looked like someone had trained her before, as if the act of moving forward was the only thing between her and a complete breakdown. As they marched on, her fawn skin slowly turned from a healthy copper undertone to a sickly shade that reminded him of spoiled milk. What little of her face he saw had been red from exertion at the beginning of their march and had rapidly faded under the force of her rattling wheezing.

 

Vasilisa didn’t make a sound as her body gave up. Instead, she merely dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, her chest barely moving as she struggled to breathe.

 

The corset had to go. Any extra weight had to go.

 

If she was conscious, the girl in question would have cried at how swiftly Carver cut the cord that kept her modesty, how he frowned and tossed the garment to the side like so much refuse. Instead her hindbrain focused on the mostly unhindered flow of oxygen, gulped it down and clicked where she should have rattled. Someone may have trained the girl in how to carry herself for war, but no one had bothered to test her body’s limits. Not for pain or exhaustion. Her armor had been put on like someone who had seen it in person but never actually participated in the act of wearing it or as a squire.

 

Nothing about the girl called Vasilisa made any sense. Not her name, the way she dressed, right down to the way she carried herself. The clothes she wore were of too fine of quality, especially for undergarments, and what fabric hadn’t been stained was dyed far too brightly to make proper sense. The fabric of her chemise was a blinding white under the mud and blood, her corset black as night and red as blood where it wasn’t embroidered with coppery flowers, the fabric of her stockings could only be black silk, and the flash of purple on her smallclothes was mindboggling. She moved in her clothes, not like someone with a secret to hide, but as if the garments themselves were truly hers.

 

Someone had spent a terrible amount of money on just her undergarments alone, and she didn’t behave like it was out of the norm.

 

And her name. Vasilisa. It wasn’t a Ferelden name, that was for certain.

 

He was crossing the Wilds with a foreign child of Maker knew what lineage. On a military march with some noble’s child that he had apparently broken and stripped on the side of the road. If he kept her safe and returned her to her family, he would probably get quite the purse. And so he carefully picked up her corset, folded it in half, and stuffed it into the bag she had roped onto her back. She stirred, just a little flutter of motion that let him know she was alive, when he slung her onto his back like she was nothing more than a tiny child to be cherished. And if her breath hitched and she curled up into his back for warmth there was no one to judge.

 

The maul had to be left behind. It was too much weight to carry feasibly for the last stretch of road before Lothering. Ideally, Carver wanted to reach his family home before the sun had completely set. The girl may have been small, deceptively and impossibly light for her size, but her size alone made the trip awkward to manage. Leaving the maul pressed up against her back and what he suspected was a broken rib would have been unimaginably cruel. But there was nothing for it. Carver would just have to make sure that whatever guardian she had replaced the weapon with something better. Children were easy like that.

 

She woke at the gates, the low groan of protest the second clue to her consciousness. The far too tight grip of her arms around his neck and the sudden loosening of what promised to be deadly pressure had been his first. “Hang on. We’re almost there. My brother’s going to love you to pieces.” Her fingers gripped into his shoulders, sharp metal from badly sized gauntlets cold even through his armor. “Just a bit farther.”

 

“Ok,” she murmured into his neck, a sweet sigh that spoke volumes on how exhausted she was. And just like that, she trusted him. Implicit consent, the sort that made his breath hitch as he tried not to think about it. This poor naive child was going to be the death of Carver Hawke.


End file.
